The slippery downhill slope on which prices were launched Wednesday, somewhat befittingly during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, got steeper Thursday, especially for Northeast citygates. Most points saw drops ranging from about a nickel to a little more than a dime, with those on either side of a dime being most prevalent. But numbers in the warming Northeast dove by as much as 49 cents.

Rockies points tended to have most of the smaller decreases of less than a dime because the region is among the few still experiencing snowy conditions and harsh temperatures.

Traders were in general agreement that the market is finally responding in logical fashion to the weak fundamental demand situation that it had largely managed to ignore for most of February so far. Except for the northern extremes of New England and parts of the Rockies and Upper Plains, severe winter weather has either already departed or is on its way out.

A dual-utility buyer in the Southeast reported no deals at all Thursday, “but if prices keep going down another dime or so, we’ll probably get back into the swing market again.” That could happen as early as today. Several sources concurred that when you factor in the mild weather outlook, massive storage volumes, Thursday’s screen drop of nearly 6 cents and the exaggerated demand slump associated with a long holiday weekend, continued declines in today’s trading are almost a foregone conclusion. A western marketer commented, “It looks like we’ll be stuck with ‘boring’ mild softness for quite a while now.”

One noted that Henry Hub had a weekend bid-ask spread of $2.195-215 Thursday afternoon on the IntercontinentalExchange platform. That would represent a drop of 6-7 cents from Thursday Hub average.

Although the Northeast was still feeling quite a bit of chill Thursday, temperatures today are expected to be nearly 10 degrees above average, a Northeast trader said. “We lost most of our previous Northeast load because of the warming trend,” he added.

A western trader said he was reporting a much bigger PG&E citygate volume averaging in the mid $2.30s than usual because “Baja Path transport was working better than it usually does.”

“I’m thinking this market could get crushed as early as this weekend, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” a Calgary-based marketer said.

An eastern utility buyer perceived it as a good indicator of how “bland” the market is becoming that his conversations with other traders so easily get sidetracked from the topic of gas markets to the start of baseball spring training and other non-industry matters.

A Northeast LDC buyer said March numbers at this point were “looking pretty strong” in the Gulf Coast, but market-area pricing appeared relatively depressed.

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